Currently, the most popular formats for conveying date and time information are incredibly archaic. Telling time in the standard hours-minutes-seconds format can be terribly confusing, especially considering that hours are calculated in a different scale than minutes and seconds, and both are calculated in a different scale than months or years. Further, a time expressed in hours-minutes-seconds format only carries one type of meaning: a time of day. Expressing calendar information can be just as difficult. For example, the Gregorian calendar contains months of differing numbers of days, is altered during leap years, and is not easily converted to measure times from dates other than January 1 of a base year, such as the commonly used Year 1 of the Common Era (CE).
What is needed is a device that can display time and/or date information in a more useful format than the traditional clock and calendar formats.